[blindLaw] Legal software accessibility

[Aser Tolentino]

Clio is way better than that at least. I primarily used it for time
tracking, though I don’t recall any controls being unlabeled. I just used
Outlook though and let calendar sync do its thing. FWIW they did have an
accessibility point of contact.
agtolentino at gmail.com


On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 4:01 PM Graham Hardy via BlindLaw <
blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
>
>
> My firm is contemplating changing legal management software to either Clio
> or Leap. I’m writing in hopes of any feedback as to their accessibility
> with JAWS. I would invite responses specific to the workflow I’ll describe,
> but I’d appreciate any level of detail in a response. It would be most
> helpful, though, when saying something is or isn’t accessible, to explain
> what it’s like, which I’ll attempt to do in my descriptions below to give
> you a good idea of what I’m looking for.
>
>
>
> Currently, we have Amicus Attorney for time tracking, calendars, tasks,
> etc. I’ve been able to get consistent results with time tracking although
> the interface is somewhat quirky, but I long ago gave up on working with
> the calendar in Amicus and just use Outlook. Amicus appears to be built
> with Windows Forms. It uses nonstandard controls for tables, so, for
> example, when I arrow up and down JAWS will report the row number but I
> have to do a Say Line to hear its contents. There are a lot of unlabelled
> controls that read as “Button” or “Edit”, and you have to memorise the
> order of controls, which is made more complicated by the fact that Tab and
> Shift+Tab take me through controls in a slightly different order. The
> calendar is not impossible to use, but I have to use the JAWS cursor a lot
> and deal with windows that seem to be on top of each other. I can work
> around the issues with the calendar by granting other people in my office
> access to my Outlook calendar, but, of course, I still can’t see other
> people’s calendars, which is the point of having a firm-wide calendar.
>
>
>
> For document management, we use Worldox. This stores all documents in
> directories by document number underneath a directory for each legal file.
> One nice thing about this approach is that I can get ahold of the original
> directory and collect all the PDF files to batch-process in FineReader,
> and, even if they’re named by their document number, I can still index them
> based on the document numbers that show up in the database. Worldox appears
> to be installed on each workstation and fetches its data from the local
> network. The program is, again, quirky in a few ways. Although it uses a
> standard list box to browse files, there are issues with highlighting being
> detected by JAWS, which frequently reports “No selected item” when I arrow
> up and down but, when I route the JAWS cursor to the current line, it can
> read the text that way. It also loves rendering ligature characters, so,
> for example, using the ligature for “fi”, it reads out “Modified” instead of
> “Modified”. Selecting files is somehow independent of the cursor movement
> in a way that feels non-native to Windows. However, at the end of the day,
> if I need to, I can export the list of files as CSV data and browse it in
> Excel and find the path for the original file as stored on the network to
> open manually, if I have to. And needless to say, files are edited in Word,
> Excel, or whatever the associated program is.
>
>
>
> All this to say, I’ve gotten used to these programs over the years and
> come up with a workable workflow even if it’s different from what others in
> my office would likely have. I can often end up going through thousands of
> pages to prepare for a proceeding, so I really do care about efficiency
> what with the user interface for navigating amongst documents and running
> them several at a time through OCR.
>
>
>
> As I say, any feedback would be helpful.
>
>
>
> Graham
>
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